Search This Blog

Pages

FAITH NO MORE at The Wiltern LA in 2015 with Duff Mckagan and Danny Devito!

In April 2015 Faith No More performed three consecutive nights at The Wiltern in Los Angeles, on their tour of the Sol Invictus album.Night one, April 22nd, was spectacular with Mike Patton taking the opportunity to shock the crowd with an s+m mask. A dynamite set including the live premiere of Black Friday.

Janky SmoothOne of the highlights of the evening was “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”. That song really displayed that Patton hasn’t lost an octave or a step and every cadence, growl, croon and wise crack were perfectly executed. Everyone in the band is pretty gray including Mike Bordin’s dreads, which have transformed into a long, white bouquet of serpentine hair emanating from his follicles- everyone but Patton, of course. As raw and real as Patton and his music are, I don’t put it past his vanity to throw in some hair dye, here and there. One thing is for sure- I’d fuck him.

However on the second night, April 23rd, things took an unexpected turn when Duff Mckagan (Guns N' Roses bassist) was introduced on stage by Patton as their gimp for the night. Duff later revealed via his twitter page it was in fact himself, he spoke about how it happened to Huff Post a few weeks later.“Their ‘Gimp’ guy got stuck in traffic or something — something like that — and Patton asked if I’d be the ‘Gimp.’ And I’d just gotten to the gig, me and another friend. I’m wearing all black, and everybody else was wearing white. ‘Cause they play in white, and everybody backstage, their crew, they all have white on. The guy I came with, Jerry Cantrell [Alice in Chains], he wore white, because he had gone to the show the night before. I picked him up, [and I said], ‘What are you doing wearing all white?’ He’s, like, ‘Faith No More white, dude.’ [I was, like], ‘Oh, yeah, I blew it.’ But being the only guy dressed in black, I was the instant ‘Gimp.'”

Metal AssaultSonically, the band is most certainly dominated by Mike Bordin’s drums and Billy Gould’s bass, but the guitar and keyboard layers, put down by Jon Hudson and Roddy Bottum respectively, are still prominent enough for fans of the more conventional and old-school varieties of heavy music to be able to enjoy the live sound as a whole. And of course, then there was the frontman, Mike Patton, presenting a wildly varied range of vocal stylings, at times hard to keep up with for those not very deeply immersed in the Faith No More discography. Patton and Bottum addressed the crowd on a few occasions but did not overdo it, and focused primarily on the music.

The third and final show, April 24th, fell on Bill Gould's birthday. During the set FNM were joined onstage by long time fan and unlikely friend of Patton Danny Devito,'Trollfooting' around the stage dressed all in white. The last time Danny joined FNM at a show was in 2012 at Hammersmith.